The Walking Dead' needs to be buried

Note: This post contains spoilers from previous seasons of “The Walking Dead,” although judging by the ratings of the season premiere, everyone is already watching the show.

Last Sunday, “The Walking Dead” returned to AMC for its fourth season, and the return was classic “Walking Dead.” It got incredibly high ratings and was of incredibly low quality — two staples of the program. I mean, let’s be honest here for a second: “The Walking Dead” is not a good television program despite the promise it showed early on. But that time window has long since closed, leaving in its place a compost pile of mediocre performers portraying one-dimensional characters that spew awful dialogue at no more than two locations per season.

While it is hard to blame the show for the lack of an expansive universe, since AMC has been slashing its production budgets for the past several years after shelling out roughly $1 bajillion to keep “Mad Men,” the other problems with “The Walking Dead” are solely the fault of the writers, directors, producers and performers.

These problems stem way back to 2010 when Oscar-nominated writer and director Frank Darabont originally adapted the graphic novel, created by Robert Kirkman and Tony Moore, and don’t seem likely to get fixed anytime soon.

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Back when Darabont first adapted the book, it was intended to be a six-episode miniseries — basically a long movie — something that the writer and director of “The Green Mile” knew all about. And his expertise showed.

The first season was a taut, well-written show that focused less on gore and more on human behavior in hopeless situations. Basically, it was “Lord of the Flies” with zombies. And as with anything that involves zombies, there was a fair amount of gore, but the gore was never the focus of the show.

This combination of psychology class and zombie horror proved so successful, though, that six episodes simply were not enough to satiate the bloodlust of the public or the bank accounts of the network, so AMC picked up the show as a series, setting in motion a series of events that destroyed the legacy of the first season and made “The Walking Dead” nothing more than a cinematic snuff film.

Turns out that Darabont, while an incredibly talented filmmaker, did not have the mentality of a TV man capable of making 13 individual episodes. As a result, the man responsible for “The Shawshank Redemption” either quit or was fired (depending on who you ask) halfway through the show’s second season. In his place was veteran showrunner Glen Mazzara, whose efforts were like using a bucket to scoop water out of the Titanic — useful at first, but overall pretty pointless.

After Mazzara took over, most of the characters on the show began to evolve into something that resembled human beings rather than the one-dimensional stereotypes. Andrea dumped her defeatist attitude and replaced it with free thought and a positive attitude. Good guy cop Rick Grimes, the show’s de facto protagonist, began to show signs of collapse under the pressure of keeping his old-world ideals in a lawless world. Glenn Rhee, a 20-something nerd when the show first began, evolved beyond being basically a video game character into an actual human being with thoughts and feelings.

These character changes happened gradually over the course of the second half of season two, culminating with Rick killing his one-time best friend and former cop partner, Shane Walsh, after the latter attempted to lure the former into a wooded area for the same purpose.

After Rick did the deed, he told the group what he did and why he did it, before telling them that he wasn’t going to kick anyone out of the group. But it was now a dictatorship instead of a democracy, and he was running the show.

Whether it was a lack of patience by the writers or a revolt from a small, but vocal, minority on the Internet, by the middle of season three, everything had reverted back to the pre-Mazzara status quo. Andrea was no longer a free-thinker after meeting the show’s biggest living supervillain, The Governor, and falling in love so hard and fast that it would make a high schooler do a double take. Glenn was back to being a video game character and Rick’s dictatorship lasted about a day.

In the place of these well-developed characters, the show opted to double down on the violence.

Sort of.

Because of budgetary restraints, the show can’t afford to go buck wild every episode, so the two times a season that violence happens, it really happens. In the in between, though, nothing happens because nothing can happen.

Tragically, at least for fans of good television, nothing will change as long as the show keeps bringing down 15 million viewers every week and “The Walking Dead” will remain yet another example of an excellent premise executed poorly.